The World War II Tragedy Everybody's Forgotten but Everybody Should Remember

Jonathan Harrison is an adjunct Professor in Sociology at Florida Gulf Coast University and Hodges University whose PhD was in the field of racism and antisemitism.

In
1942, the Nazi atrocity that received the most American media
attention concerned ethnic Czechs rather than Jews. On June 10, 1942,
the Germans massacred the inhabitants of Lidice
in reprisal for the assassination of Obergruppenführer
Reinhard Heydrich. The event came to mass
attention in the US to such an extent that it led to this
speech by Wendell Wilkie and a
decision by one Illinois town to change
its name to Lidice. However,
Lidice is not as well remembered today as the Nazi atrocities against
Jews that had received far less coverage than Lidice at the time. For
example, the shooting of over 50,000 Jews at Babi Yar, Kiev, which is
a central component of Holocaust remembrance today, was, during the
war itself, relegated
to the inside pages of the New
York Times. This tells us an
uncomfortable truth about US culture in 1942: Jewish victims of
Nazism still mattered less than those of Hitler's Christian victims,
and would continue to do so until American troops reached the camps
in the US-occupied zone of Germany three years later.

The people of Lidice

In
June 1942, Lidice was an important moment of escalation in signifying
the boundaries the Nazis were prepared to cross. It was one thing to
murder eastern European Jews in secrecy in enclosed camps or under
cover of partisan warfare; another entirely to massacre a village of
Christians and leave
photographic evidence of the
carnage in full view. It was a provocation of the western allies by
Hitler in the sense that the Führer
was no longer concerned about American public
opinion or the prospect of postwar criminal charges. The
justification for such recklessness was phrased by
Goebbels, on March 2, 1943, as the
fact that "Experience teaches that a movement and a people who
have burned their bridges fight with much greater determination than
those who are still able to retreat."

The destruction of Lidice

Conversely,
it must also be considered possible that the Nazis had not
anticipated how Americans would react far more angrily in 1942 to the
massacre of Czechs than the murder of Polish and Soviet Jews. Lidice
was a signal that the US press could unleash its wrath on the Nazi
atrocity apparatus without appearing to be sympathetic to Jews or
encouraging a reduction of immigration controls. Moreover, the
exaggerated role enjoyed by Lidice in western perceptions of Nazi
crimes continued into 1945, when this
British newsreel commemorated the
third anniversary of the massacre, whilst "The
Governors of nine States joined
with members of Congress...in calling for the commemoration today of
the third anniversary of the destruction of Lidice."

Death at Lidice

Why
was this signal given when massacres of Jews had been relegated to
inside pages? Since 1924, US immigration policy had restricted
immigration from Poland and the USSR to the USA, implicitly on the
grounds that those populations contained persons who were considered
not fully civilized, or perhaps not fully white. The antisemitic
undertones of the restrictions were clearly understood, as this
author notes. Czechoslovakia also
had a quota but sympathy for ethnic Czechs was encouraged by their
Christian status and the fact that the country had been duplicitously
annexed by Hitler in 1939, contributing greatly to the road to war.
Equally importantly, Czechs could be considered white, whereas the US
was still some distance away from accepting that Christian
schoolgirls might identify with an adolescent Jewish diarist such as
Anne Frank. In my view, it was the role of Americans as camp
liberators in 1945 that finally opened the US to the belief that Jews
were the brothers and sisters of American cultural values, deserving
of sympathy and empathy. It was a long road to full acceptance of
Jews in the US.

In
2014, this has led paradoxically to a relative neglect of Lidice
anniversaries in the west. The Illinois city of Crest Hill, which had
renamed itself Lidice in 1942, has a
memorial in the city and a
ceremony on the anniversary, such as that held
this month. But official presence
at state and federal level at these anniversaries clearly does not
match that at Holocaust memorials. This neglect is unfortunate on two
levels: it is both an overlooking of an important atrocity but also a
selective forgetting of America's wartime double standards.